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Love of Place
Written By: Jane Gibson Nardy - Cashiers Historical Society | Issue: 2021/07 – July
John Zachary’s peripatetic daughters always managed to make it home to the Cashiers Valley.
Geneva Zachary and Julia Zachary circa 1920
In circa 1900, after graduating from Teacher’s Normal, forerunner of Western Carolina University, John Alexander Zachary (1881-1919,) accepted a one-room schoolhouse teaching job in a small Georgia town near Atlanta.
He was named after his great-grandfather, Col. John A. Zachary, one of the first settlers in Cashiers Valley.
By 1910, young John Zachary had met and married a Georgia girl; moved to Atlanta; changed professions from teacher to railway mail clerk; and became the father of two girls, Geneva and Julia.
He was not a well man and by the fall of 1919, at the age of 38 years, he succumbed to the then-deadly tuberculosis – a slow, painful death.
While John’s widow, Viola, struggled to make a living by taking in boarders and making hats, daughters Geneva and Julia were students at Atlanta’s Fulton High School as well as taking after-school jobs to help make ends meet.
Geneva worked for Western Union, riding her bicycle all around downtown delivering telegrams. Julia worked for Norris Candy Company where she was befriended by the wealthy Lowensteins, owners of the candy company. They taught her how to dress and walk and fix her hair as well as teaching her how to run a very successful candy company. (She eventually became vice-president of the company.)
Starting even before their father died, Geneva and Julia would take every opportunity to spend time with their Zachary grandparents in Cashiers. They would board the train in Atlanta and get off the train in Hendersonville, North Carolina. There they would transfer to a little train that terminated at Toxaway, North Carolina.
There, their grandfather, T. R. Zachary (1850-1921), would meet them with a mule-drawn wagon. It would take them a large part of a day to make it up to Cashiers. They would frequently have to stop to remove big rocks out of the dirt road. But, oh, how happy they were when they finally got to the house that T. R. had built in circa 1882. Cashiers Valley was their favorite place in the whole world.
That strong love of place would be passed on to future generations.
